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Photo of William Crowther, 2012

I just noticed that a few days ago, a Wikipedia user uploaded a photo to the bio for computing history legend Will Crowther. The caption reads “Will Crowther in fall of 2012 in the Shawangunk Mountains.” A bit of Google-fu leads to several photos showing Crowther is still climbing (the hobby he had long before he took up caving).

Crowther, part of the team that hammered out the infrastructure for linking computers in the immediate precursor to the Internet, is best known for writing the ground-breaking text-parser game Colossal Cave Adventure (1976; expanded by Don Woods 1977).

The commercial text games that followed “Adventure,” by companies like Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls, were among the best-selling games of the 1980s. (See Jason Scott’s documentary GET LAMP.)